Department of Psychology
Department of Psychology
Amrisha Vaish

Amrisha Vaish

Amrisha Vaish
Pamela Feinour Edmonds and Franklin S. Edmonds, Jr. Discovery Associate Professor in Psychology
Email: av8u@virginia.edu
Research Areas

Office Address: 140L Gilmer Hall
Lab Website: Early Social Development Lab; Child Development Laboratories

Biography

Dr. Amrisha Vaish received her B.A. in Psychology and English from the University of Virginia in 2002, her M.A. in Psychology from the University of Chicago in 2006, and her PhD in Psychology from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Free University Berlin in 2010. Prior to starting at U.VA, she was a Dilthey Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Research Interests

Humans are inordinately cooperative beings, and our ultra-cooperative, moral nature is thought to account for our success as a species. My research focuses on the ontogenetic emergence of the moral emotions, cognitions, and behaviors that make children successful cooperators. This includes the emergence of social emotions such as sympathy, guilt, and forgiveness; of moral evaluations of one's own and others' actions; and of moral behaviors such as helping, sharing, and the enforcement of moral norms. I have also recently begun examining more uncooperative phenomena, such as cheating and reputation enhancement, in order to expand our understanding not only of when and why cooperation works but also of when and why it doesn’t.

My other research interests include infant social referencing, children's understanding of others’ desires as an early form of theory of mind, and the development of the negativity bias.

For more information about Dr. Vaish's research click here.

Selected Recent Publications

  • Stern, J. A., Yucel, M., Grossmann, T., & Vaish, A. (2025): Environmental moral cognition in children and adults. Journal of Cognition and Development. https://doi.org/10.1080/15248372.2025.2547625

  • Chai, Q., Wu, X., Yu, J., Vaish, A., Shen, M., & He, J. (2025). How prosocial modeling promotes children’s sharing: A goal contagion account. Developmental Science, 28(3), e70020. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.70020

  • Marlow, C., Kelsey, C. M., & Vaish, A. (2023). Cheat to win: Children’s judgments of advantageous versus disadvantageous rule breaking. Cognitive Development, 66, 101328. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2023.101328

  • Vaish, A., & Oostenbroek, J. (2022). Preferential forgiveness: The impact of group membership and remorse on preschoolers’ forgiveness. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151(5), 1132-1140. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001114

  • Vaish, A., & Savell, S. (2022). Young children value recipients who display gratitude. Developmental Psychology, 58(4), 680-692. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001308

  • Yucel, M., Drell, M., Jaswal, V., & Vaish, A. (2022). Young children do not perceive distributional fairness as a moral norm. Developmental Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001349

  • Chajes, J., Grossmann, T., & Vaish, A. (2022). Fairness takes time: Development of cooperative decision making in fairness context. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 216, 105344. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105344

  • Vaish, A., & Hepach, R. (2020). The development of prosocial emotions. Emotion Review, 12, 259-273. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073919885014 [Invited target article]

  • Beeler-Duden, S., & Vaish, A. (2020). Paying it forward: The development and underlying mechanisms of upstream reciprocity. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 192, 104785. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2019.104785

  • Oostenbroek, J., & Vaish, A. (2019). The emergence of forgiveness in young children. Child Development, 90, 1969-1986. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13069

Awards

  • Max Planck Society Sabbatical Award, 2021

  • All-University Teaching Award, 2019

  • Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions, Association for Psychological Science, 2018

  • Designated “Rising Star,” Association for Psychological Science, 2015

  • Division 7 Dissertation Award, American Psychological Association, 2012

  • Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award, Society for Research in Child Development, 2011